I’ve been through a lot of Wordpress upgrades to 2.5. Each time I notice something different. There are many promising little features.

Here are a few:

• a separate panel for managing tags and categories
• fancy media uploader
• auto plugin upgrades (my personal favorite)
• improved wp-config security
• a back button after editing a post
• drastic improvements in overall admin css by Happy Cog

We’ve been busy upgrading Wordpress versions. 2.5 has some terrific features and merges the style of Happy Cog with the meat and php of Wordpress.

Recently, I’ve had the pleasure of checking out Pictura Gallery and creating some slideshows for them. I’ll make sure to link to their site once it’s up and running.

2.5 is finally here. Well…almost. Wordpress has unveiled Release Candidate 1 for the 2.5 series. I am testing it on KOOP and WORDCHASM. The dashboard is a little bit slower, but the new features make up for that.

The only problem I’ve noticed thus far is a lack of cross-compatibility when it comes to browsers. I’m having more luck in Safari than with Firefox on the Mac. That is a rarity. The image uploader and html writer does quirky things in Firefox thus far…

I’ve been testing ELGG, the open source social networking software, for a week or so now. Overall, I’m pretty pleased. Its short comings fall in the speed department. Simple calls seem to take longer than they should. That, I’m sure, could be sorted out by a caching module of some sort.

Check out my test run if you want. It isn’t anything fancy yet, but I am intrigued by the flexibility of ELGG. It isn’t quite as flexible as Wordpress, but it does a lot out of the box.

Matt Mullenweg and Automattic, creators of Wordpress, recently launched their new Twitter-based theme, Prologue. It really takes a lot of the work out of blogging. Prologue users can stay logged in, type away on a home page, then post.

Wordpress has announced that their .4 release will be forgone in favor of releasing .5 in March. This release should be a big one — boasting many new features.

Wordpress’s world-renowned spamfighter extraordinaire, Akismet has recently shown up at Pligg. A modified version, connected to the Wordpress API is now lending much needed help to Pligg site owners. If you haven’t uploaded this handy module yet, grab it today!

Roll out the red carpet. Wordpress won the Best Open Source Social Networking CMS Award from Packt!

And buy one of these lovely t-shirts today. The price is a bit steep, but you know it’s quality.

After racking my brain for hours upon hours working for a solution to this:

WordPress database error: [Table ‘triajnamics.trinamicspost2cat’ doesn’t exist]SELECT p2c.category_id AS cat_id, COUNT(p2c.rel_id) AS numposts, UNIX_TIMESTAMP(max(p.post_date_gmt)) + '-4' AS last_post_date, UNIX_TIMESTAMP(max(p.post_date_gmt)) AS last_post_date_gmt FROM trinamicspost2cat p2c INNER JOIN trinamicsposts p ON p2c.post_id=p.id WHERE (p.post_status='publish' OR p.post_status='static') AND p.post_date_gmt<='2007-09-28 03:49:02' GROUP BY p2c.category_id ORDER BY numposts DESC

I realized that creating “dummy tables” was the best way to go. Adding in an old post2 table seems to satisfy Wordpress 2.3. In summary, I thought it was my theme or my webhost, but it was simply Wordpress choking on the table it hastily deletes. If you read the codex forums, they’ll likely drone on about your incompatible plug-ins. For me, and I suspect others, this was not the case.Upgrading? I’d of course back-up your files and database, disable all plug-ins, and upgrade. Check for errors. None? Celebrate. String of errors on index.php? Try adding in an old table from your back-up (whichever one your error messages are referencing).Good luck!